Winter Jay. Remembering war: the Great War between memory and history in the twentieth century

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130 practices of remembrance

is clearly lying, as the sailors aboard Paris’s ship attest willingly. But

Helen, whose heart is made of stone, is quite literally untouchable;

Hector is speaking the truth, but not the one his companions think

he is. Ulysses goes along with this conceit, and sees peace accom-

plished for a very paltry price: he will tell Menelaus that nothing had

happened to Helen in Troy. ‘‘I have more than enough eloquence to

convince a husband of his wife’s virtue.’’

The soldier/diplomats withdraw and peace seems assured, un-

til the very last moment, when the heroic fool Demokos shouts,

‘‘Treachery, and to arms’’ when he realizes that Helen is returning to

Greece. Signiﬁcantly enough, Hector kills Demokos, who in his last

breath lies, and says that Ajax had killed him; this lie provokes the

Trojans to kill Ajax, setting the war in motion. Hector is defeated,

and the doom of his people is assured. The Trojan poet Demokos is

dead, says Cassandra, ‘‘and now the Grecian poet will have his

word.’’ Homer’s Trojan War, sung ﬁve centuries after the events in

the play, is about to begin.

What a game Giraudoux has described. But its playfulness only

masks the deadly seriousness of the drama. In a way, irony is the

vehicle for a battle of representations, in which heroic notions of war

collide with heroes stripped of those very beliefs. La guerre de Troie

n’aura pas lieu is a duel between paciﬁsm, represented by Hector,

and heroism, expressed by Demokos. The poet is one of the old men

who praise war without knowing it. He is a pale imitation of Barrès

and others whose heroic aggression somehow had survived the car-

nage of Verdun and the Somme and had come to threaten the world

again.

What the play describes is an ironic ambiguity familiar to anyone

who—like Giraudoux—surveyed the French veterans’ movement in

the interwar years. As Prost has shown, they were men whose hero-

ism could not be challenged; now, in the aftermath of war, they were

determined to make war on facile notions of heroism. If they did not

Intellectual Styles and Responses 131

speak out, it would return. Like Hector, they had a sense of a mission

constantly eluding them. The corrupt politicians and poets and

propagandists were still there. To ex-soldiers like Giraudoux, who

knew what combat was, another war was both unthinkable and just

around the corner. That is what the interwar phrase entre-deux-

guerres is all about.

It would be an injustice to an ironist of the stature of Girau-

doux to limit his play to this single frame of reference. Yes, he had

fought both on the Western Front and at Gallipoli; yes, he had been

wounded twice and decorated with the Legion of Honor.

≤∞

Yes, he

was a diplomat who knew from many of his superiors and his adver-

saries what cheap, overblown language looked like. But his art is

hardly autobiography; to assume so is to fall into a trap much cruder

than his prose. I suggest that it is the tone of his voice which sets him

aside from most French writers of the war generation as well as from

the didactic cadences of the veterans’ movement in interwar France.

Irony sets him apart. And drew him sympathetically, temperamen-

tally, to those other ironists across the Channel who meditated on

the war. His ironic detachment, mixed with moral purpose, made

his reactions to the 1914–18 war closer to those of Owen and Sassoon

than to those of Barbusse and Genevoix.

It would be pointless to try to explain completely the complexity

of Giraudoux’s voice through his biography. The elegance of his

prose would shrivel under such heavy-handedness. We know that his

reach was European, and indeed extra-European. At the École Nor-

male Supérieure, he wrote his thesis on ‘‘Quel but poursuit l’Al-

lemagne en dévellopant sa marine de guerre?’’ (‘‘What Is Germany’s

Aim in Developing Its Navy?’’). Not much irony there. Nor was there

anything unusual in a French intellectual’s deep acquaintance with

and admiration for German language and literature. What was

somewhat more unusual was that Giraudoux’s sympathies extended

to the Anglo-Saxon world as well.

132 practices of remembrance

Here he beneﬁted from a current of Francophilia deeply en-

trenched at Harvard. In part funded by James Hazen Hyde, son of an

insurance tycoon, Harvard launched an exchange program which

brought Giraudoux to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1907. When the

professor of French was struck down with typhoid fever, Giraudoux

delivered his lectures on eighteenth-century French literature. He

was active in theatrical productions there, too. After a tour around

America, he was introduced to President Theodore Roosevelt. It was

at this time that Giraudoux decided to bypass the Agrégation in Ger-

man and a future academic career and to concentrate on diplomacy.

That career would take him to the highest levels of the French

diplomatic service. In the 1920s and 1930s, he traveled extensively, as

inspector of French diplomatic missions. Naturally, the Franco-

German dialogue was of major concern to him, as it was to all

diplomats, but his gaze was not ﬁxed on this one issue. His interests,

as well as the sources of his vision, were multiple. The ironic voice he

found was truly European, and through it he expressed without

sentimentality the Sisyphean struggle toward a European peace al-

ways just out of reach.

All his adult life Giraudoux struggled with the duality of war and

peace, and found in irony a way of expressing the tragedy of his

generation, scarred by one war and seemingly unable to avoid an-

other. That ironic voice was both distinctive and echoed others like it

outside of France. In this sense he was a poet of the sentiments at the

heart of the interwar French veterans’ movement. But he was a poet

with a voice of his own, one with ironic cadences with clear a≈nities

to other literary responses to the war.

≤≤

Conclusion

If it is true that British and French intellectual responses to the Great

War were di√erent, and that irony is one facet of that di√erence, the

Intellectual Styles and Responses 133

question remains why should this be so. In brief it may be useful to

draw on some conjectures which move intellectual history outside

an older tradition which privileged the pure study of style and sen-

sibility over cultural and political contexts.

My aim is to point to some disparities, some di√erences in em-

phasis and location which may be of interest in situating these mate-

rials. First, the notion of irony rests more easily with those further

removed from the battleﬁelds of the war. France was invaded; the

bloodshed occurred on French soil, and the outcome of those battles

determined the outcome of the war. There is not much room for

irony on these points. But there are other, longer-term contrasts

which may lay behind the di√erent tone and emphases in these two

countries’ intellectual responses to the war. Some of these arose from

the very di√erent role played by ex-soldiers in postwar society. There

was nothing in Britain remotely like the French veterans’ movement.

The proportion of ex-soldiers who joined veterans’ groups in France

was four times greater than in Britain. The absence of conscription

before the war, added to the controversy over conscription during it,

provided few supports for making veterans’ experience a centerpiece

of postwar political discourse. There wasn’t even a minister for vet-

erans’ a√airs in Britain, that business being handled by the Ministry

of Pensions, set up initially in 1908 to help the elderly. Individual

veterans became prominent in interwar politics, but when they

tried, like Oswald Mosley, to introduce military forms into British

political life, they failed miserably, consigned to an obscurity from

which they never escaped.

It was not only that veterans’ politics di√ered in the two coun-

tries. It was that the distance between intellectual groups and the

political world in France and Britain was very di√erent. Years ago, in

doing some work on the French war economy, I was astonished to

learn that the Minister of Commerce, Étienne Clémentel, would

excuse himself from ministerial meetings so that he could walk over

134 practices of remembrance

to the rue de Varenne where he was conducting experiments in

optics in Rodin’s house. Could that have happened in London? Per-

haps, but I don’t believe it did. And Clémentel was not exceptional;

others like Clemenceau crossed the line between the arts and public

a√airs time and again. I might point to the well-known fact that

British and French intellectuals live in a di√erent proximity to the

institutions of the state, and that this positioning might reinforce

what Raymond Williams referred to as di√erent structures of feel-

ing, di√erent styles of expression. One aspect of that di√erence is

what I have called the ironic temperament, and especially its utility

as a distancing device.

A word or two should be added about the structuring e√ects of

irony on political protest. Irony both enabled and contained it. The

British recourse to an imagery of games and gamesmanship, to fair

play and decency, built into that irony a kind of limiting force. Games

suspend time. When they come to an end, nothing in the real world

has changed. Could not the same be said for irony as a sport, a game

played for its own sake? The ironist could have his say, and then just

fade away. In this sense, irony is both the fate of an intellectual class

without a direct political function and a means of ensuring that this

remains the case. Distance has its price alongside its privileges.

Above all, irony destabilizes. It rules out certain kinds of cer-

tainty. It is a mirror in which the gaze confronts something which is

not quite what it seems to be. Confronting it means admitting that

all interpretations, including this one, must remain up in the air.

chapter 6

War Memorials

A Social Agency Interpretation

Historical remembrance is a process which occurs in space and time.

So far we have had a look at photographs, war letters, plays, and

novels. But the locus classicus of remembrance in the interwar years

and beyond are war memorials. These sites, statues, and sculptures

have been subject to a vast literature. To add a di√erent perspective,

I would like to o√er a modest proposal that we not de-construct,

but rather shrink the framework of discussions of commemorative

forms in the twentieth century. I want to argue that shifting the scale

of vision from the national and grandiose to the particular and

mundane may help transform our understanding of war monu-

ments, and of the forms of remembrance which occur surrounding

them. In villages and towns throughout Europe, small groups of

people have always stood between topoi and experience, between

sites of memory and collective remembrance. It is their activity and

their achievements which form the core of this chapter.

Why shift the focus from high to low politics, from capital cities

to obscure towns, from ﬁrst-order to second- or third-order actors

in social life? One reason is that the great national sites of remem-

brance are exceptional, and their histories provide a misleading im-

pression of thousands of others. Another is that in contemporary

cultural history, multivocality is the order of the day. The thrust of

much recent work in social and cultural studies has been away from

136 practices of remembrance

an earlier top-down approach, which emphasized the capacity of

dominant groups to act in e√ect as puppeteers, pulling the strings of

cultural activity. That elites have tried to do so is self-evident, as we

have noted in our discussion of cultural memory; less convincing is

the claim that they e√ectively controlled the space within which all

forms of cultural expression in general and commemoration in par-

ticular have developed. Cultural history is a chorus of voices; some

are louder than others, but they never sound alone.

To adopt a pluralistic approach to cultural history has many

advantages. It enables us both to respect national notations and

forms and to avoid being blinded by them. Memories are both

personal and social, and sites of memory are created not just by

nations but primarily by small groups of men and women who do

the work of remembrance. They are the ‘‘social agents’’ of remem-

brance; without their work, collective memory would not exist.

I want to argue that these ‘‘memory activists,’’ in Carol Gluck’s

phrase,

∞

frequently constitute powerfully uniﬁed groups, bonded

not by blood ties but by experience. They share the imprint of

history on their lives, and act as kin do in other contexts. They

endure together, they support each other, they quarrel, and they act

together. At times, their bonds are su≈ciently strong to enable us to

call them ‘‘ﬁctive kin.’’ It is the trace of these groups we ﬁnd in the

work of remembrance, and in many war memorials themselves.

‘‘Fictive kinship groups’’ are the key agents of remembrance.

What do we know about them? A great deal: they are goal-directed

people, with an agenda, a project, whose traces may be found in

local and national archives. The modest size of these cohorts is both

their strength and their weakness. They can act in e≈cient and

coordinated ways. Frequently such associations lose their power—

and perhaps even their identity—once they grow beyond a certain

scale. No one can say precisely what the threshold is that separates

small groups of ﬁctive kin, who share what Avishai Margalit terms

War Memorials 137

‘‘thick relations,’’ from large groups, whose relations are ‘‘thin,’’

≤

and

whose identity is much more di√use and evanescent; but I have no

doubt that such a threshold exists.

Wherever it is, the threshold falls well short of the nation. To be

sure, nations have been termed families for centuries; the small

stands for the whole in a metonymical manner. The czar was the

‘‘little father’’ of the Russians; the royal family in England was the

model for the British nation, at least until recently. Political move-

ments have used familial rhetoric too. Maurice Barrès liked to con-

jure up the political landscape in terms of ‘‘les grandes familles

politiques de la France.’’ But when we deal with mass movements or

nations, we move from tangible realities to abstract, or imagined,

ones. Once beyond a certain threshold, families are not agents but

metaphors, and metaphors do not make monuments. Groups of

people do. The question as to how and why they have done so in the

twentieth century, and how we may do so today, are at the center of

any discussion of collective remembrance.

After o√ering some thoughts on the concept of collective remem-

brance, I want to address the issue of social agency, and to relate the

construction of commemorative forms to a prior and parallel process

of the gathering together of groups of survivors who, through what I

call ‘‘ﬁctive kinship,’’ do the work of remembrance.

≥

Finally, I want to

address the question of the continuity and the breaks between such

activity in the ﬁrst and second half of the twentieth century.

Collective Remembrance

A word or two is necessary about what I mean by the terms memory,

collective memory, and cultural memory. Let me once again borrow

from the work of Jan and Aleida Assmann to introduce the termi-

nology of cultural memory into this inquiry. The Assmanns use the

term to describe

138 practices of remembrance

the re-usable and available texts, images and rites of each so-

ciety, with the preservation of which it stabilizes and spreads its

self-image; a collective shared knowledge, preferably (but not

necessarily) of the past, on which a group’s sense of unity and

individuality is based. The topoi and narratives which appear in

monuments need an institutionalized communication, without

which their re-use cannot be organized. Therefore, we do not

only inquire into the history, form and meaning of the monu-

ments as artefacts, but also into the history of their use and their

re-use.

I have serious doubts about the concept of ‘‘stabilization’’ as one

of the functions of monuments, especially when some central issues

surrounding the Holocaust can never be ‘‘stabilized.’’ But in some

respects this deﬁnition is a useful starting point. My remarks should

be understood as attempts to reﬁne and apply these concepts to the

work of the small groups of people who create and re-create these

sites of memory. The thrust of my argument is toward the presenta-

tion of a matrix of activity, in which the small scale is recognized

alongside the aggregate, in which particular agendas are privileged

alongside societal imperatives of legitimation.

To describe a set of social processes happening on several levels at

once requires constant attention to who is doing the work of remem-

brance. I like to use the term remembrance to describe a social pro-

cess; memory, both individual and collective, is its product. Remem-

brance has an active, transitory quality; it has a beginning and an

end, an existence in space and time. Its very delimitation is its

strength as a heuristic device.

The Collective Remembrance of War:

A Social Agency Approach

The term cultural memory denotes more than the property of indi-

vidual people, but it works best as a category of analysis when it is

War Memorials 139

applied to the activity and products of groups and not to that of

states as a whole. War memorials are a case in point; by any deﬁni-

tion they are salient elements in the cultural memory of twentieth-

century Europe. Some of these monuments are grandiose, self-

serving tributes, to be sure; but many go beyond state-sponsored

triumphalism to approach the regional, the local, the particular, and

the familial realities of loss of life in wartime. I would like to draw

attention to this latter category.

Here the dialectic between remembering and forgetting is vis-

ible, and is especially salient in nono≈cial forms of collective re-

membrance. Such e√orts are always the outcome of agency, the

product of individuals and groups who come together not initially

or exclusively at the behest of the state or any of its subsidiary

organizations, but because they have to speak out.

Why? Here we are at the intersection of private memories, fam-

ily memories, and collective remembrance. The men and women

whose activity underlay the creation of war memorials lived through

war as trauma, understood as an overwhelming, sustained, and mass

experience. Many were in mourning; most were torn by war from

one set of daily rhythms and were in search of another. Their deci-

sions to act in public—by creating associations, by writing memoirs,

by producing ﬁlms, by speaking out in a host of ways—were pro-

foundly personal. But they were not private matters only, since they

existed in a social framework, the framework of collective action.

My argument, therefore, stands at a midpoint between two ex-

treme and unacceptable positions in this ﬁeld: between those (fol-

lowing Bergson) who argue that private memories are ine√able and

individual, and those (following Durkheim) who see them as en-

tirely socially determined and therefore present whether anyone acts

on them. With Blondel, I urge that such approaches are best located

in ‘‘the gallery’’ of useless ‘‘abstractions.’’

∂

In between is the palpable,

messy activity which produces collective remembrance.